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The Oil of Joy for Mourning

When my first son was born, I was overjoyed to be able to stay at home with him, but I wasn't prepared for how quiet and solitary a life it would be. We had only one car, which my husband drove to work each day, so I was literally a "stay at home mom.” Ours was the only house on a commercial street, and we had no neighbors. No one stopped by to chat or invited me over for lunch and an afternoon of scrapbooking. It was just me and a baby too young to speak.  As all the quiet and solitude soaked into me, I began to suspect that I might be depressed. Every time I read a magazine article or heard a special lesson in church on the subject, I examined myself, comparing my feelings against the list of symptoms. Had I lost interest in activities I once enjoyed? Did I sleep too much or too little? Was my fatigue the normal result of nighttime feedings, or was it a sign of a deeper problem? My feelings were never an exact match for the lists I studied, but my mind drifted back to ...
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Setting and Symbolism in “The Yellow Wallpaper”

(This 900-word essay is a literary analysis of the setting of the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It draws a parallel between the main character's deteriorating mental condition and her perception of the room where she's imprisoned.) The setting of “The Yellow Wallpaper” could be described as a series of concentric circles, beginning with the grounds and proceeding inward to the house itself, the bedroom, and finally, the titular wallpaper. The wallpaper receives the most attention, both in the story and in interpretations of the story, but the bedroom also deserves the reader’s attention. Is it really an innocent place, a room where children once lived and played? Clues scattered throughout the story suggest it was not. This reality emerges in step with the narrator’s mental breakdown and show that the room is literally a prison cell and the narrator isn’t its first unwilling guest. At the beginning of the story, the narrator...
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Swallowing the Bitter Pill: Protecting Speech We Hate

The Westboro Baptist Church, led by preacher Fred Phelps, became famous—or infamous—by protesting funerals. WBC members wave signs and shout slogans, the best-known of which is "God hates fags." This is usually supplemented with other eye-catching phrases specific to the death upon which they are capitalizing, such as "God killed your sons," "God sent the shooter," "God sent the IEDs," "God blew up the shuttle," or "Thank God for dead soldiers,"  In 2007, the family of Matthew Snyder, a Marine killed in Iraq, sued Phelps and his church for inflicting emotional distress on them by staging one of these notorious protests. The trial court found in favor of the Snyder family, but the WBC appealed. The case, Snyder v. Phelps, eventually reached the Supreme Court, which decided eight-to-one that the protests were protected by the First Amendment. How could the court have reached such a decision? As a believer in God's i...
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